High-Performing Business Leaders Learn From Employee Feedback

High-Performing Leaders Say, 'Show Me the Feedback'

If you haven’t read it yet, you may want to read my first HRTools Insight about leadership training and how it elevates ‘natural born leaders’ to higher performance levels. High-performing leaders make ‘it’ all happen: They sell visions, build team camaraderie and inspire supportive cultures of innovation and motivation—to name just a few differences that top-performing leaders make. 

Employee Feedback Tells the Story

To make ‘it’ all happen, high-performing leaders need employee feedback. Multisource feedback, also commonly known as 360-degree feedback, is a valuable tool. Multisource feedback includes comments provided by employees at various levels throughout an organization. 360-degree feedback programs can also include comments provided by external groups such as customers, vendors, etc. These comments are normally gathered and kept in confidence; the recipient only sees the final results, not the individual feedback comments.

As with any feedback, to make it worthwhile, the information has to be used in the right ways. First of all, the leaders have to be receptive to the feedback. There also must be appropriate follow-through. For instance, if a leader receives feedback about behavioral competencies that he or she is not aware of, additional learning experiences-type training may be necessary.

The following sample questions—which refer to competencies that high-performing leaders can demonstrate—help explain what we mean:

1. How do you give feedback to an employee?
2. How do you talk to employees when there is a dramatic change taking place?
3. How do you get people excited about a new project?
4. How do you rally people from a tough loss in the marketplace?

As explained above, employee feedback can also help answer these questions. Leaders can learn how effective their leadership is by reviewing employee feedback results.

Why Leadership Matters to Employees

High-performing leaders must have excellent communication and interpersonal skills. They also innately want to make decisions. Most importantly, they must have the ability to connect with people. If you look across the board, the effective leaders are the ones who engage people. People are willing to listen to them and they are open to their ideas. These are the leaders who people see as wanting to do the right thing. These traits are important to people because leaders affect them in personal ways.

Based on my experience, these abilities have nothing to do with IQ or management skills. High performing leaders want to interact with others, they want to get to know them and they want to learn from them. Obviously there have been hundreds and hundreds of books written about leadership. Many of these books tend to focus on the “superstars.”

I find that learning experiences and, again, that employee feedback, often end up serving as the best teaching moments. An unexpected or surprise event can prompt someone to step up and take decisive action, which can then turn into a leader’s greatest moment. It may be a difficult situation, and they never thought about how they would have responded, but they turned it into a positive experience for their followers. On the other hand, if employees feel misled, most of them will tell you if you just ask.

My next Insight will focus on classroom-teaching experiences for high-performing leaders.

High-performing leaders sell visions, build team camaraderie and inspire supportive cultures of innovation and motivation. High-performing business leaders also rely on employee feedback.